Wednesday, October 21, 2015

For years, the more dimwitted of the climate denialists have been yammering on about a pause in global warming. This is not based on the measurements and models that even some climate scientists are puzzled about. It's based on using a chart that begins in 1998, which was an unusually warm El Niño year. By using a very warm starting point and a more ordinary ending point, they make it look like nothing much has been going on for over a decade.
It's all nonsense. But two can play at that game.

Drum points out that it's even warming faster if you start with 2011. Feel free to use and abuse

I can add an interesting observation: the UAH and RSS lower troposphere temperature data isn't showing a strong El Niño warming. The surface data is going offscale. But El Niño is supposed to heart the lower troposphere more than the surface. The divergence between the two data sets is getting spooky.

By the way, did you guys and gals see The Martian? Did you get an urge to visit Mars?

Mark, surface temperature anomalies have been soaring since the aborted 2014 El Niño. The corresponding troposphere increase just isnt there. Mi not a climatologist but i did develop a good eye for trouble shooting dynamic models, If I had the ability to supervise climatologists I would have the data sliced and diced to understand what's happening to the lapse rate.

And I don't mean the model outputs, I mean the real world data. It shouldn't be too difficult to grab the latest Argo data, grid it properly in reanalysis and check the differences with the atmosphere, then dig into water vapor and clouds. Something just doesn't add up.

"[M]y UAH cohort and boss John Christy, who does the detailed matching between satellites, is pretty convinced that the RSS data is undergoing spurious cooling because RSS is still using the old NOAA-15 satellite which has a decaying orbit, to which they are then applying a diurnal cycle drift correction based upon a climate model, which does not quite match reality.")

FL, the so-called "satellite temperature data" from the MSU/AMSU instruments is actually a measure of microwave emissions at TOA. The original claim from UAH that this data represents temperature and that it may also be used to construct a valid time series is based entirely on theory. Spencer and Christy's work has been shown to be wrong by several other researchers over the years, including me. I found a clear difference in the annual cycle between the UAH v5 data and radiosonde data over the Antarctic. S & C have not responded to this finding, to my knowledge. RSS decided to exclude data poleward of 70S in their time series construction, claiming that the high surface elevation over the Antarctic was a serious problem. S & C originally warned in a "READ.ME file" about the influence of higher altitude terrain on the MSU, but that warning has disappeared from their web site.

S & C have come up with a new approach to develop the v6 time series. Spencer posted a description of v6 on his web page a while back and some of what he claimed to be doing appears reasonable. Last I heard, they have not published their methods, so v6 is still to be considered a BETA product. I would expect that they are still relying on the same theoretical construct which they used to derive their algorithm for v5, which I think may be flawed...

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett, a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny who finally handed in the keys and retired from his wanna be research university. The students continue to be naive but great people and the administrators continue to vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional without Eli's help. Eli notices from recent political developments that this behavior is not limited to administrators. His colleagues retain their curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they, or at least some of them occasionally heeded his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.